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The picture she was going toward had a man just settling down to sleep beside a pleasant spring. Obviously the dream was for him; the mare would arrive just after he fell asleep. The moonlight was bright.
    But the night mare tripped on a stick just as she got there. The noise made the man wake, and he saw her. She tried to turn and retreat, because bad dreams just didn't work on waking folk. But both misjudged their steps, and fell into the pool. Water splashed up, soaking them--and little hearts flew out in patterns.
    “It's a love spring!” Monica exclaimed. “How romantic!”
    “Hey--maybe we'll see them signal the stork!” Ted said.
    It was too late for man and night mare to escape; they had seen each other and fallen in love. They came together--and at that point a nasty cloud hid the moon, and the scene went dark. That always happened, frustratingly.
    When the light returned, both man and mare were gone. There was a blink, signaling elapsed time, and then a young centaur appeared. He was about three years old, black like the night mare, and his face resembled that of the prior man. He was the offspring the stork had delivered to the love-spring folk.
    The centaur walked oddly, moving from one shadowed section to another. Soon it was apparent that he was shadow-walking: going between shadows. He was solid, like his father, but walked in darkness like his mother. That was an interesting combination.
    Then the centaur encountered a regular man, wearing a dull gray shirt. They talked, but the Tapestry did not give sounds, so what they said wasn't audible. But probably the centaur was explaining how he had come to be. He seemed to have a good future ahead of him, because he could move quite rapidly between shadows, jumping from one to another, yet do something solid when he got somewhere.
    The man in the gray shirt did something odd. He turned half real. His form left the scene, and a mere trace traveled backward in time; they could tell because all the other scenes on the Tapestry were now running backward. This was weird; the children had not seen this effect before.
    The shirt-man came to the love spring, four years before, where the first man was settling down for the night. The shirt-man solidified and went to the place where the night mare would soon trip on the stick. He picked out the stick and set it in the brush where it wouldn't be in the way. Then the shirt-man faded out and zipped back to the place and time when/where he had encountered the special centaur. But the centaur was no longer there. Satisfied, the shirt-man walked on.
    “I don't understand,” Melody said. “What happened to the centaur?”
    “Oooo,” Harmony continued. Four O's was all she could manage alone. “I think I know. That stick--he moved that stick.”
    “And that means the night mare didn't stumble over it,” Rhythm concluded.
    “So the sleeping man didn't wake,” Ted said.
    “And so he received the bad dream, just as he was supposed to,” Monica said.
    “And there was no meeting in the love spring,” Melody added.
    “So they didn't signal the stork,” Harmony said.
    “And no centaur was delivered,” Rhythm finished.
    They sat on the bed, mulling it over. “That man in the shirt,” Ted said. “He did it on purpose!”
    “He traveled back and stopped the mare from meeting the man,” Melody said.
    “He unhappened it,” Harmony said.
    “What a dastardly deed!” Rhythm said.
    Ted for once was thoughtful. “If he did that to the centaur, what will he do to other folk he doesn't like?”
    “Suppose he doesn't like us?” Melody asked.
    That made them all thoughtful. “Maybe we better tell Mother,” Harmony said.
    “But she always says no,” Harmony said.
    “Maybe we better do something about it ourselves,” Melody said. “That man can travel in time; nobody else can do that, except maybe us.”
    The more they considered it, the more they thought they should. For one thing, it would alleviate the